Five More Great Games: Hail Hydra, Firenze, Libertalia, Battle Line, Downforce

[Music] good afternoon everybody welcome to five more great games in the dice tower i'm tom vassell and i'm graeme anderson graham is one of the reviewers here on the dice tower and we hung out together centuries ago it seems back in the day all the way up from canada um but are we in the same time zone yeah we are in the same time zone right yeah so all is well there but i bet our temperatures are quite different outside it's it's getting warmer i don't have to wear a jacket today so that was nice i didn't have to wear a jacket in august what although for me it feels like i'm swimming as i go through well folks if you've never played fi if you never play it's not a game but if you've never seen five great games i'm going through the games that are not my top 100 but are the next 200 we're still is like 175 or something um then i'm going through five games and i just bring someone on and i know grandma's played at least one of these actually knowing graham he's played probably at least two of them i'm gonna guess and i'm gonna try to guess which ones he's played and if not convincing me should play them which four of these five you definitely should play no matter what um and then well that's it folks so let's start here i'm gonna remember to turn the screen on this time so here's our first one for today this is hail hydra now hail hydra i gotta be honest here folks this game when i made this list it's probably lower now it probably won't be above the next four games that i'm going through i like hail hydra i like the theming it's a social deduction style game it's just that there's a lot of social deduction games out there right now there's so many i like the theming of this one anyone could be hydra agent graham i'm gonna assume you have not played this one that is correct and you you talked about the theme and um oh don't say it graham don't say it i i know very little about the theme oh i thought you're going to say you don't like the marvel cinematic universe it for me it's fine but i've only read a couple comic books i've seen the movies but it's not like i'm dying to play a marvel movie a marvel game well yeah a marvel game marvel movie that makes sense yeah i like this one here it's uh interesting so uh it's good if you like social production games it's worth getting it's funny because today all the games that i'm going through are ranked in reverse order practically so this one's ranked 2654 on board game geek but i think a lot of people would like it so if you don't like or if you don't know very much about uh the mcu is it still worth playing i would say it's okay i mean because you're essentially just you know hiding in a crowd being a secret person but i would probably just say play the resistance there's a lot of similarities between them i know i should be like i said i was gonna that you should play four of these games i'm talking about the next four okay so this next game forensi is a game a lot of people haven't heard of but it is an amazing game it takes a very simple mechanism so if you look at this picture you'll see there's all these cards at the bottom with buildings on each card and on your turn you have to take the one that's closest to you you get all those blocks to build with your building towers of different colors and you do whatever the card says but some of the cards are bad and some of the cards aren't as good as others so you might want to skip to a different card but then you have to drop a building block on each card you skip that's mostly what the game is it's about collecting blocks building towers trying to build high ones of each tower but it's simple it's clean and it's really fun and yet i hear so little about this game i'm gonna guess graham you have not played it uh actually i have played this one i actually bought this game because of your review well then that's way many years ago do you like it i do i really like this one i love the the putting the blocks on for the ones you don't want and you also have to be building each color tower each round or as they get destroyed right so kind of kind of like if you start building a red tower you need to keep doing so and it puts a lot of pressure on you um to do it but i i the card system i've always liked in small world you know you can jump over and pick different races but that's a very minor part of that game in this game it's the whole game and also has that chunkiness of building towers which is fun yeah yeah excellent game all right well good i was gonna tell you you should play it but you already have all right now we jump to pirates libertalia which is one of my favorite pirate games in libertarian if i ever get to a card that's in english you have a bunch of cards uh each of these cards there's i think there's 30 cards in the deck and each card you're you're going to have this i think there's 50 actually 50 different pirates but you're only gonna use nine per round come on does every no pirates here speak english anyhow each round you have nine cards then you all play one at the same time and then you play another one and you're gonna do that and you'll play six of your pirates and then you leave three pirates and then you get nine more pi or six more pirates everyone gets the same so you have some difference in there and knowing when to play each it's like the most advanced round of rock paper scissors there is i like the pirate theme if you like citadels you like it graham i was gonna guess that you have played this one i have played this one as well this one as much as i love it i would love to see an expansion for this yeah so jamie stegmeier registered the the trademark for this game but then has said he's not printing it and then winked really big or in verbal writing um so i don't know if there's a new edition of this but yeah i do wish there was like i wish i just did pirates 51 to 70 right yeah yeah i i love the you're changing hands where everybody starts with the same but it then starts to change over time that the three cards i kept behind are not the same as the three cards you kept behind right and so you you have some idea of what other people have in their hand and you say well they still haven't played this pirate and i know this pirate if i play this the pirate they play will basically cancel mine out but are they going to play this turn or next turn and that's fun it also plays six players not i i wouldn't say like extremely well but it pulls it off and five players is fine and very few games like this can do that all right so that's libertalia now we'll jump to one of the best two player games ever designed and that's battle line which was re-implemented by shot and totten so i mean you could look at one or the other i'll pull up shot and time here as you can see it so they're essentially the same game at this point in time shot and tottenham battle line and look at the artwork here for battleline let's look at shot and time it makes me happier in this game which is similar to lost cities in a few ways you are building groups of numbered cards in front of you and you are trying to build a better group of three cards than your opponent does you're playing essentially like nine mini games of poker against your opponent and then you use logic to prove that they can't win at a spot and then the newest version of shot and time which is not this artwork this is the original shot in time here's the new artwork um they also adds a deck of special cards which some people like i do and some people don't but you can play with or without them um anyhow graham see you should have played this one so i'm going to say yes because i will shame you if you haven't i have i've played the i played the newest version the uh one of the tactics cards in it you did not play shot and time two hopefully that's not really as good no i've played the the the newest version of shot and taunt so what'd you think of it i enjoyed it i i really like the ability to say i can prove that you can't take this this stone away from me right um like the whole logic thing and i think it's it's nice and it's simple enough that i i've played this with with many people but the whole idea of trying to outguess what your opponent is trying what he's going to do next because you need three stones in a row so if he's already got two you know which side do you try and which try which side you think they're going to go after and which side you need to stop them on yeah uh the the fact that it could be any three in a row or any five definitely changes the game up in that regard uh but it's also there's almost no theme my wife loves playing this game with me and it's just numbers for her you know it's also just numbers for me who's pretending here you don't feel that the scottish you know blood flowing through through you as you're playing this i've never felt the scottish blood flow through me i have zero percent scottish in me all right last game for today is downforce another re-implementation of top race so this is the game that really kind of put restoration games on the map uh i mean restoration had made other ones before downforce but downforce is the game that has and still does very well a simple game where you are sponsoring one of the cars but you don't really care which car wins as long as you bet on the right card and whenever you play a card so i apologize to everyone for showing a picture of bonacore but whenever you play a card it will move the different cars in different orders different speeds so you're trying to make the cars you bet on do well and the cars that you don't bet on get blocked by other cars it's a great racing game there's a lot of expansions you have to have played this by this point yes i was actually late to the table for this one four out of five you're on the ball but once i got it i actually played it a couple times i had to have to get the expansion right away it is so fun especially because it's a nice easy game to play but it's still a lot of fun because you're you know you're trying to guess who's going to be first because you have all the betting lines when you cross and the card play and you think oh i've only got one card left to move the car i want to win so hopefully someone else will move it for me that last you know step or two um yeah this is it's a fantastically fun game so i've upgraded my set with the little mario cars which i really like i got them from the mario gamer monopoly and so it's like playing a little mario kart but i like the expansion so i think there's is there two or three expansions there's two i think there's two yeah there's two for sure there's one where there's the tracks cross for no reason at all then then there's one with a jump and with animals crossing the road like a safari so whoops i am jumping way up there we go press the wrong button so downforce is definitely the easiest game to play on this list for sure and this is one that if you never played games before i would say you should try this one out a great racing game yeah definitely all right folks let's see here which one you like best so i'm gonna put a link in the comments it's your chance to vote on which one of these you like the best there's not a ton of people in chat right now so who knows it could be any vote here but what do you think people will vote for for number one i think downforce because it is so approachable um it's relatively new compared to some of the others and yeah like i said it's just a fantastically easy game to get into yeah i think you're right because hail hydra is mad was mass market but i don't think it was it was in and out of stores really fast forensic isn't it's more of an esoteric game libertalia is out of print battle line shot in totten i don't know you're probably right about downforce but i got to pick a different one than you so i will say libertalia let us see well at least i got second place oh no frenzy just caught up to libertalia well go figure hale hydra got none [Laughter] well yeah go figure yeah forensic would have got my vote that's from that list that's my favorite well it was my favorite except like i said hale hydra's moved down for me so yeah forensic just one of those it's also a game that when people come and i'll say let's play this game i feel sh i'm i'm always confident they haven't played it before so it's a and it's an easy it's a really easy game to teach people yeah so alrighty well congratulations to restoration games for downforce alrighty graham if people want to find you on the internet where would they go best place is to check out my videos on the dice tower what yeah so keep an eye out for that yeah well i look forward uh we mean before we started me and graham were talking about the someday period where we'll see each other in person um and that will come at some point but for now we're glad we can at least do this thank you to everybody who joined in watching us in 45 minutes shoot some marbles the greatest marble racing channel the marble racing show on a board game channel is happening you want to come root for your favorites there but that's it until next time i'm tom vassell i'm graeme anderson and you've been watching five more great games with the dice tower you

Channel: The Dice Tower

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Rating: 4.965517 out of 5

Keywords: board game, board, game, dice, card game, cards, catan, monopoly, tower, dice tower, vasel, review, tom vasel, vassel, settlers, gaming, GeekUsername: TomVasel, board game review, boardgame, uno, ticket to ride, apples to apples, educational games, educational, top 10, juegosdemesa, Brettspiele, ボードゲーム, brädspel, jeuxdesociété, משחקילוח, 보드게임, deskováhra, graplanszowa, bordspel, 棋盘游戏, gioco da tavolo, desková hra, gra planszowa, настольная игра, trò chơi trên bàn cờ, jogo de tabuleiro, لعبة اللوحة

Id: VaTGZMP5neM

Length: 16min 6sec (966 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 03 2021